Overheating
Frequent overheating will damage the motherboard! Here is an expanded article on heat and laptops.
Symptoms:
The laptop starts beeping, freezes, restarts by itself or shuts down after it has been on for some time, typically 10-15 minutes or more. If you start it again, it does the same thing after just a few minutes.
Troubleshooting:
Most laptops overheat because the fan intake is blocked either from placing the laptop on a soft surface or by dust. In either case you will need to let it cool down before turning it back on (may take up to 30 min). If you suspect that dust is blocking the fan/heatsink, get a compressed air can and try to clean it now (that will cool down the laptop too).
Sometimes overheating is caused by a fan malfunction. If the fan is completely stuck, the laptop will show an error message immediately after starting. However in rare cases the fan’s fins are just loose or broken and won’t move enough air to cool the laptop.
In either case you should try cleaning the fan(s) and heatsink(s) with compressed air. That is best done outside, as usually there is a surprising amount of dust accumulated in there. If the laptop continues to overheat, you will need to bring it to a repair shop.
Also if you have dropped the laptop, the screws holding the heatsink may have broken off. In this case the laptop will overheat in just a couple of minutes as the CPU has lost contact with the heatsink and is not cooled at all.
An owner of an HP Pavilion tx2517ca PC Tablet, and proud of having it. Purchasing this CDN$1,100.00 tablet is a lesson learned that you should never purchase anything with out doing your pre-research purchase. At least now, I learned that the overheating product isn’t just my computer but 1000’s of customers who has the same issue & HP doesn’t seem to act on this issue at all. There are lots of other issues like WIFI Interference is a lot more sensitive than its competitor.
Most people aren’t aware of laptop overheating problem when they buy a laptop so that they don’t pay attention to things that can make laptop overheating. Even they’re not aware that small stuff can make their laptop overheating, such as sitting the laptop on a surface which is not flat, such as the bed. Lots of information should be had by laptop owners to prevent such a problem.
I have a Acer Laptop. The fan on the bottom left side make a conimus noise when a program is running. Any idea why this is happening?
I have a Toshiba Laptop that runs perfectly. The problem is that I always get a message saying that it is overheating and to seek service. Please advise me how I can bypass/eliminate that message. Thanks.
Hi Jim G,
It’s definitely the silver stuff you need! Without this special goo the heatsink doesn’t make contact with sufficient surface area of the CPU and it will overheat within a few minutes of booting up as a result. Get some new goo; it costs about £2 a tube.
I’m quite convinced that I’ve got overheating problems on my Toshiba Satellite M45, as I once had my heatsink totally clogged and it was never the same after that. More recently, I left my laptop in my car on a very hot day after a long roadtrip and now it only works in Safe Mode. It starts in regular mode, but will freeze after three minutes or so. This happens even at the XP log-in screen, so it’s not related to any program I’m running. But in Safe Mode, it works perfectly fine. And one night after I opened all the hatches on the bottom of my laptop, it worked for about an hour in regular mode before freezing. I have no idea why.
Now, I know my heatsink is no longer clogged, as I removed it yesterday and it barely had any lint at all. But is there perhaps some heat-related reason why it would only work in Safe Mode? Like perhaps a temperature sensor that freaks-out when the regular drivers are running? I’ve asked tons of people and nobody has told me anything that makes sense or has worked. But this website seems to know stuff that others don’t, so I thought I’d try here. I wouldn’t even mind paying a repair guy money if it was some fix I couldn’t do, but I just don’t want to pay big bucks for him to troubleshoot something for many hours, just to find out it was something I could have done myself.
Might I just need to replace the silver stuff that connected the heatsink to the board? Or turn-off a driver of some sort? I’m fine with missing most regular features on my computer, but I work from home and it’s killing me that I can’t print anything. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.